The other pilgrim
GV on pilgrimage – that’s what I think our summer theme this year is – different kinds of pilgrimages – solitary journeys, spiritual experience, seemingly little but nonetheless still major our own inner pilgrimages.
There’s also being a more obvious pilgrim in Canterbury – becoming one of the Pilgrim Family for the two weeks of training. However, now that I’m here for the second time already, I find myself perceiving a similar reality much differently than before – as if I’d become another person – another pilgrim - in those three years since my last visit here. Maybe I had ….
Things that moved me the last time – the elements of humanised creative lesson planning etc. – now seem to reveal their face of well prepared and somewhat disguised, however still – (just?) teaching tricks. Is that all that we – as teachers – can do? Change the lesson order, mix the exercises, which will still remain the same thing they used to be – the ever-applied and widely-accepted class organization schemes of pre-teach/teach/post-teach etc? These frames are slowly beginning to constitute the limits of not even so much teaching possibilities, but much more the learning process itself, and isn’t it what our whole work and effort is or should be about? Learning, not teaching? Is it possible that CLIL and Task Based Teaching are the only solutions EFL has to offer advanced students besides the dull and mind-numbing course-book patterns? I refuse to believe that – I need to and want to find a different path – even if it were to be only mine….
We’ll see what comes out of it…
The other pilgrim
Justyna, I have exactly the same feeling, that these teaching tricks painfully limit what could be done in a classroom…